Mobile application marketplaces include many free applications that typically rely on advertising as a source of revenue. Accordingly, many consumers are drawn to the free mobile applications as opposed to paid applications in mobile application marketplaces. For instance, targeted advertisements can be displayed during execution of an application by a mobile client, which can provide a revenue stream.
While use of in-application advertising has enabled proliferation of free applications, fetching and displaying advertisements in an application can contribute to energy consumption of the application. For instance, downloading an advertisement can take a few seconds; however, after completion of downloading of the advertisement, a network radio can remain in the transmission state for an extra period of time, referred to as a tail time. Depending on the network operator, the tail time can be 10 seconds, 17 seconds, or the like. The tail time can alleviate a delay incurred when moving from an idle state to a high-power transmission state, but can increase energy cost, which can be referred to as tail energy. The foregoing can cause a significant energy overhead associated with providing advertisements during execution of applications with a mobile client.
Many conventional techniques attempt to reduce the energy consumption associated with downloading advertisements by reducing the tail time; yet, such solutions would have to be implemented by a network operator, and thus, may not be deployable. Another traditional technique attempts to aggregate traffic. For instance, traffic generated for communication of an advertisement can be aggregated with traffic associated with the application. However, functionality of an ad network may be detrimentally impacted due to delays associated with receipt of the advertisement. Thus, aggregation of traffic may not be compatible with some types of applications executed on a mobile client.